NOTE: Ignore the email address in the column graphic to the left. MY email address is thesavorytench@yahoo.com . Don't ask me why. I think it has something to do with fish, or maybe the drummer for the group that did that 'Damn The Torpedoes' album I like so much, but honestly, a man's mind is a forest at night.

April 12, 2004

And then, depression set in

Today started out with some pretty good news… I opened my email up and found a note from Doc, with an attachment. The attachment turns out to be the graphic you should be seeing up above, instead of the usual blog title. Doc apparently just got it sent to him from PublishAmerica, and passed it along to me, and now I’m passing it along to you.

It’s a minor thing… not exactly on the same level as Doc getting a big fat check and being able to quit his lousy job, or having the girl of his dreams call him up and tell him she loves him… or, even better, having either of those things happen to me. (Well, I don’t know how well I’d like it if the girl of Doc’s dreams called up and confessed undying devotion to me, but Doc generally likes hotties, so I could probably deal with it.)

But still, I like cool stuff like this… seeing that cover is nearly as good as holding a hard copy of UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE in my hot little hands… something I’m looking forward to, since I am probably the very first person who ever read the thing all the way through, and I can’t wait to have my own actual professionally published copy to put on my shelf and gloat over. And Doc was pretty pleased, too. So that was a nice thing.

Then I went to work and they took a chainsaw to me.

Let’s back up. Last week, a girl named Julie, whom I barely know, was very nice to me. I happened to be walking out towards the front on my lunch break (around 8:30 in the evening) to walk around outside and get some air, and she was at her cubicle, all alone in a large room (everyone else in that half of the call center goes home at 8). I guess she was bored. We’d talked a little prior to this… ‘hi’ and ‘how are you’ and like that… but nothing special, and of course she’s way too young for me and has a boyfriend. But she’s hot and seemed nice and she said hi, so I walked over. She’s in the business department, which after 8 at night gets very slow… she often has half an hour between calls.

So we’re talking about this and that and I keep glancing away every time she leans forward, because she’s sitting down and I’m leaning over her front cubicle half-wall to talk to her and she’s in this very low cut blouse and if I don’t look away, I’m going to stare and drool, and I know women do not perceive that as cool, and she’s being nice to me and I don’t want to offend her.

Finally, she says “Why do you keep looking over there?” and I laughed and said “Well, your blouse gaps open every time you lean in and I don’t want to stare and be offensive.” To which she laughed and said “Oh, those are just my boobs… I don’t care, stare at them… they get in my way everywhere I go.” And I said “Well, I’m sure they’re very nice but you have to be careful when you’re at work,” and she laughed and we kept talking about a lot of stuff, but not her boobs. However, most of it was kind of personal, having to do with her private life (I just kind of shut up and listened to her) and I’m not going to repeat any of it here.

So today I’m at work for about half an hour, and my first three calls are annoying and deranged, and I’m trying to get a goddam simple $13 dispute to go through and my system keeps giving me error messages, when I get told by this guy Brad, who works in HR, and I don’t know very well, to sign off on 6 (Feedback) after the call is over as he needs to talk to me.

So I do, not suspecting much, because I turned in re-enrollment paperwork for the health plan right before my shift today, and I figure I must have filled something out wrong. But I ask him, “So, what did I fill out wrong?” and he gives me this really hard look and says “It’s not appropriate to talk about it here” and all of a sudden I nearly shit my pants, because that’s the look they give you when they’re about to can your ass.

So we get over to his office in the other building, where I’ve never been before, and he sits me down and says “I need to let you know that this is a matter that could result in termination”. Then he hands me a pad and a pen and says “This is your opportunity to give me a written statement regarding anything inappropriate you may have said or done in the last week.”

Now I’m panicking, because honest to Jebus and all His little sea monkeys, I cannot for the life of me remember ANYthing I’ve done for the past week that might be inappropriate, as I understand what ‘inappropriate’ means at Pridemark. The problem is, nearly anything CAN be inappropriate, if someone makes a complaint. You could tell a buddy while on break in the lunch room “I got a call from this guy in San Francisco and I’m pretty sure he was gay” and if the wrong person overhears that and decides to go to their APM and file a written complaint, you could get in trouble for it. But I’m generally very careful what I say at or around Pridemark, so I couldn’t think of the slightest thing, and I said that to Brad, as well as asking him for details of this complaint that had been laid against me or this incident that had gotten me pulled in here. I mean, how am I supposed to respond to something if I don’t know who’s saying it, what they’re saying, or what the context is?

Brad won’t budge. “I’m conducting an investigation. Complaints have been made against you, written complaints about inappropriate behavior that could result in your termination. This is your chance to write up your side of it. Every story has two sides, this is your chance to give me a written statement about yours.”

Again, I am baffled, bewildered, and utterly buffaloed. I have no idea what the fuck I could possibly have done… and complaints, plural, have been made against me? Written complaints? About inappropriate behavior? What the frick is goin’ on here?

At this point, my conversation with Julie is light years from my mind, by the way.

Finally, after I repeat a couple of times that as far as I know, I haven’t done anything inappropriate in the past week and I’m completely perplexed by this, Brad says, in a tone I’d describe after giving it some thought and reflection as ‘at least mildly contemptuous’, “You call telling a woman she has nice breasts appropriate behavior?”

Now, let’s take a time out here while I make a confession that will doubtless damn me in the eyes of any and every female reader this blog may still have: I do not necessarily regard the act of telling a woman she has nice breasts to be inappropriate. Nor, for that matter, do I regard it as being necessarily appropriate. It depends on context. There have been times in my life… long ago and far away, alas… when it was entirely appropriate for me to tell a woman she had nice breasts, and she did, and she appreciated me saying so, and on a couple of occasions, demonstrating that I meant it.

However, I presumed Brad took for granted that the context was “At Pridemark, in a manner the woman found offensive”. So I did not say that, I simply told him (truthfully) “I have never in my life told a woman she had nice breasts while in the workplace, and I certainly haven’t done it while working here”.

Well, Brad insisted, he had complaints. Multiple complaints. Written complaints. And people did not just come in and sit down and go to the trouble of filing complaints for no reason. And this was my opportunity to give him a written statement regarding this incident (at which point I wanted to scream, but did not, “WHAT FUCKING INCIDENT?”) . Except he didn’t put it as “this incident”. He simply said “Any inappropriate behavior you have committed in the last week”.

In other words, hey, if you don’t know what we’re talking about, ‘fess up to something. Maybe we’ll just fire you for THAT.

All I could think of, when he indicated I had, apparently, told some woman she had nice breasts, was the conversation with Julie. Now, Julie had stopped by my cubicle ten minutes before Brad showed up and been very nice to me today, so I’m pretty sure she didn’t complain about this. But it’s possible someone overheard our conversation… I foolishly didn’t realize that was possible until I was heading back to my cubicle, and I realized I could clearly hear reps on the phone on the other side of the partition, so maybe they’d heard us. But you never know about that.

So I wrote up some details about the conversation with Julie, including the fact that she’d made some disparaging remarks about a co-employee or two (Julie is a little gossipy) and I’d agreed with her in particular about one employee, and if someone had overheard that, well, maybe they were pissed off about it. Brad went over that part with me in some detail… “You said all this in the call center? And you were on lunch but she was still working when you had this conversation?” So apparently, this is very important… the fact that the person I made the so called offensive or harassing remark to didn’t mind doesn’t matter. (Assuming it’s this incident they’re talking about. If it isn’t I’m absolutely hogtied and hornswoggled trying to figure out what the hell it is they’re talking about.)

Then Brad sent me home and I’m supposed to hear from him before I go into work tomorrow at 3:30 regarding, well, whether I should go in to work tomorrow at 3:30.

If I get fired over this… as seems likely at this point… I’m pretty much fucked, as I have no idea where else in St. Carmichael I can find a job (if I did, I’d be working there already, I loathe Pridemark).

However, leaving aside everything else, I have to say, this is absolutely the most completely insane and deranged way to conduct an investigation imaginable. “This is your chance to give me a written statement on anything inappropriate you may have done in the past week?” What the fuck is THAT? If they fire me after that nonsense I have to believe I will have some kind of cause of action. Whether I can find a lawyer to take my case I have no idea, but still, that’s the most… well… utterly demented way to investigate a complaint I’ve ever heard of. It’s like something out of George Orwell.

Anyway. Right now I’m thinking about breaking my ‘only birthdays, weddings, and when the Saints are getting their asses whipped’ rule and going out and getting really really fucking drunk.

At which point, I will probably tell the good looking female bartender at the Ale Pail that she’s got really nice breasts.

Oh, and I also want to say this… any male who is so whipped that he gives another male a contemptuous look over an accusation regarding telling a woman she has nice breasts needs to check under his couch cushions for his dick. Telling a woman she has nice breasts is not sexual harassment, any more than a woman nudging her female co-worker when a male hotty goes by and saying “check out his butt” is sexual harassment. “Sexual harassment” is not, as it has come to be assumed to be in most workplaces since the late 20th Century “any mention or incident regarding gender or sexuality that makes any worker or co-habitant of the workplace environment uncomfortable”. (This is actually the definition I once saw in a handbook at another place I once worked.) Sexual harassment is actually a very specific legal term. It refers to a superior using their position or influence at work to threaten, induce, coerce, or otherwise compel a subordinate to provide them with sexual favors.

Now, that’s pretty heinous, and I think anyone who does that should, most likely, be fired and sued, if not straight out arrested, tried, and jailed (since it strikes me as pretty much rape). I think it should be called ‘rape’, not ‘sexual harassment’, because, unfortunately, the term ‘sexual harassment’ has become such common coin in the work place now that, indeed, many people feel they are now entitled to work in an environment in which no co-worker ever says or does anything at all that they find even remotely annoying, disturbing, or offensive.

All I can say is, I wish to GOD that was true; I go into work five days a week and people do things that offend or annoy me constantly. Apparently, at Pridemark, if I go make a written complaint about these behaviors to Brad, he will investigate them and, I guess, fire these people for ‘harassing’ me.

Except, of course, he won’t. Because the stuff that offends and annoys me is, for example, a woman in the next cubicle closely questioning a male co-worker, while I am there and forced to listen, about what he would do in the hypothetical situation that he inadvertently impregnated his girlfriend, and then scolding him when he reluctantly admitted he’d want her to get an abortion. I also get at least mildly irritated when I have to listen to the Born Agains in the next row talk about the blessings of Jesus in between calls, and there is a woman I used to sit next to who gets a lot of sales, and she does it by being absolutely insipid and sucking up to her customers in the most ridiculous away, talking to them about her kids and praising Dubya and saying how much she wants to live in Texas because she knows it must just be a paradise after being governed by the President for so long (when she gets a caller from Texas, I mean).

All this crap makes me grit my teeth and long for a hammer (if only so I could beat myself unconscious) but I do not complain that these people are ‘harassing’ me because they aren’t talking to me and they have no intention of offending me and if I honestly wish God would come down and rapture the little fuckers the Christ off my planet right this pukin’ second, well, that’s something that’s between me and the Lord and you few people reading this right now. I’m not going to file a written complaint alleging that I am being ‘religiously harassed’ or ‘politically harassed’ because pointy headed mouthbreathing dimwits talk about this completely inappropriate crap in loud voices in the work place.

None of this matters, of course, because chances are, I’m going to get a call from Brad at 1 or 2 p.m. tomorrow telling me not to bother coming in; he’s completed his investigation and concluded that I am not fit to continue working in the oh so tolerant and politically sensitive Pridemark environment.

I hope that doesn’t happen, because I do not know what I will do… beg for PayPal donations, I guess. I won’t be able to get Unemployment because I will have been fired for cause, and I live in a Right To Work state, which is one of those oddly Orwellian phrases that actually means “Your employer can fire your ass at any time for any reason at all, or none”.

Maybe Doc will get rich off UM and share some of it with me, his first and most faithful fan.

Or, you know, maybe winged monkeys will fly out of… oh, you’ve heard that one.

Yeah. Getting drunk sounds like a plan. Definitely. Yeah.

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RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

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THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

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